Windows Live Writer, developed by Microsoft, is a desktop blog-publishing application that is part of the Windows Live range of products. It features WYSIWYG authoring, photo-publishing and map-publishing functionality, and is currently compatible with Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint blogs, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Telligent Community, PBlogs.gr, JournalHome, the MetaWeblog API, the Movable Type API, Blogengine, Squarespace, and all blogs that support Really Simple Discovery.

Windows Live Writer introduces the Provider Customization API that enables both rich customization of Windows Live Writer's behavior as well as the opportunity to add new functionality to the product. Currently Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, and TypePad have all taken advantage of this API to expose additional service-specific features within Windows Live Writer.

Partition Logic is a free hard disk partitioning and data management tool. It can create, delete, erase, format, defragment, resize, copy, and move partitions and modify their attributes. It can copy entire hard disks from one to another.

Partition Logic is free software, available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It is based on the Visopsys operating system. It boots from a CD or floppy disk and runs as a standalone system, independent of your regular operating system.

Partition Logic is intended to become a free alternative to such commercial programs as Partition Magic, Drive Image, and Norton Ghost.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Partition Logic supports most basic PC hardware without any additional work or configuration. It has very modest (by today’s standards) requirements:

Pentium-class or better x86 processor. Supports all modern Intel x86 and AMD processors.

FreeRDP-WebConnect is an open source HTML5 proxy that provides web access to any Windows server and workstation using RDP. The result is amazing, especially considering that no native client is required, just a plain simple web browser!

Platform support

HTML5 has came a long way in the last few years, with any major web browser (including mobile platforms) supporting WebSockets, the underlying communication mechanism employed by FreeRDP-WebConnect.

Here’s a list of supported desktop and mobile browsers:

FireFox >= 11.0

Chrome >= 16.0

Internet Explorer >= 10

Safari >= 6

Opera >= 12.10

Safari Mobile >= 6

Android Browser >= 4.4

Supported client desktop OSs:

Windows, OS X, Linux

The FreeRDP-WebConnect service itself can be installed on most recent Linux distributions and on every x86 and x64 Windows versions starting with Windows Server 2008:

Windows Server 2008 / Windows Vista

Windows Server 2008 R2 / Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 / Windows 7

Windows Server 2012 / Hyper-V Server 2012 / Windows 8

Windows Server 2012 R2 / Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 / Windows 8.1

How to install FreeRDP-WebConnect on Windows

The installation on Windows is really easy. To begin with, download the installer from their website and run it:

Accept the license, select the installation type and optionally change the install location:

Next comes the HTTP and HTTPS configuration. You can just accept the defaults and go on with “Next” or replace the options to match your environment. Make sure to choose ports not used by other services. The installer will create a self signed certificate for HTTPS, no need to worry about it. Windows firewall rules are also automatically created if enabled.

The OpenStack settings are required only if you intend to use this service with OpenStack, otherwise you can skip them. Authentication URL, tenant name, username and password can be retrieved from your OpenStack deployment, while the Hyper-V host username and password are required to connect to RDP consoles and can be either local or domain credentials.

We’re done with the configuration, press “Next” and the the installer will complete the installation.

Once done, point your browser to “http://localhost:8000″ (or a different port if you changed it above) and you’ll see the initial connection screen (using Chrome on OS X in this example, but any of the options listed above is also valid):

Set the host, username and password and click connect:

That was it, connected! A native client will still have an edge in terms of performance, but for a lot of scenarios a pure web client enables an amazing whole lot of new possibilities!

Integration with OpenStack

We integrated RDP support in Icehouse, on both Nova and Horizon. All you have to do to make it work is to specify the url of your FreeRDP-WebConnect service in the Hyper-V Nova compute nodes as detailed below and restart the nova-compute service. The Hyper-V Nova compute installer takes care of these settings as well of course!